November 4, 2021
[quote]For decades, it’s been one of Hollywood’s darkest rumors: Natalie Wood was sexually assaulted by a top movie star more than twice her age when she met with him at a hotel in Los Angeles as a teenager.
[quote]In a memoir coming out next week, Wood’s younger sister identifies the long-suspected assailant: Kirk Douglas.
[quote]“I remember that Natalie looked especially beautiful when Mom and I dropped her off that night at the Chateau Marmont entrance,” Lana Wood writes in Little Sister, alleging that the incident happened in the summer of 1955, around the time Natalie Wood was filming The Searchers.
[quote]The meeting had been arranged by their mother, Maria Zakharenko, who thought that “many doors might be thrown open for her, with just a nod of his famous, handsome head on her behalf,” according to Lana.
[quote]“It seemed like a long time passed before Natalie got back into the car and woke me up when she slammed the door shut,” she writes. “She looked awful. She was very disheveled and very upset, and she and Mom started urgently whispering to each other. I couldn’t really hear them or make out what they were saying. Something bad had apparently happened to my sister, but whatever it was, I was apparently too young to be told about it.”
[quote]According to Lana, Natalie did not discuss with her what happened until both were adults and Natalie, after describing being brought into Douglas’s suite, told her sister, “And, uh … he hurt me Lana.”
[quote]“It was like an out-of-body experience. I was terrified, I was confused,” Lana Wood remembers her saying.
[quote]Lana, now 75 and about eight when the alleged incident occurred, remembered her sister and their mother agreeing it would ruin Natalie’s career to publicly accuse him.
[quote]“Suck it up,” was their mother’s advice, according to Little Sister, much of which focuses on Natalie Wood’s death in 1981, when her body was found off Catalina Island in California.
[quote]Authorities initially ruled the death an accidental drowning, but that has changed after years of scrutiny and more witnesses emerging. Wood’s husband at the time, Robert Wagner, has been called a person of interest and Lana Wood is among those who hold him responsible for her death.
[quote]In her book, she recalls promising her sister not to discuss the assault by Douglas, but rumors were so prevalent that when he died in 2020, at age 103, Natalie Wood’s name trended along with his on Twitter. Lana Wood, whose own acting credits include The Searchers and the TV series Peyton Place, believes enough has changed since her conversation with Natalie that she can now tell the whole story.
[quote]“With no one still around to protect, I’m sure she’ll forgive me for finally breaking that promise,” she wrote.
[quote]Douglas’s son, actor Michael Douglas, said in a statement issued through his publicist: “May they both rest in peace.”
